Quantifying and predicting Canada's ocean carbon sink

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The ocean absorbs about one third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities, resulting in substantially lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and slower rates of climate change. However, the ocean's carbon absorption rate is vulnerable to climate change and is likely to decrease in the future. Despite its importance and vulnerability, the rate at which the ocean absorbs carbon is surprisingly poorly known, especially how variable it may be on smaller regional scales. Canada has been investing significantly in new technologies to observe the ocean and in expanded numerical modelling resources. Our proposed Marine Carbon Sink project seeks to capitalize on these investments by developing techniques to transform new observations of marine carbon into reliable estimates of the ocean's carbon absorption rate. This will involve calibrating and quality controlling the observations, determining air-sea fluxes from the observations, quantifying the impact of biological processes on carbon, and integrating different measurements into a single regional average. Our project also seeks to improve predictions from numerical computer models. This will involve determining the strengths and weaknesses of different models, quantifying the extent to which observed changes are driven by long-term climate change as opposed to natural variability, and establishing which marine processes need to be included in models to obtain the most accurate predictions of future ocean carbon absorption. We will accomplish these objectives by forming a network of students and a postdoctoral researcher with academic and government scientists across Canada to advance our understanding of carbon dynamics in Canada's three ocean regions and to develop integrated observational/modelling techniques to quantify and predict the ocean's natural role as an important carbon sink.